Well I gave up on ODE+Plane2D, to much hassle to get it working.I got the tip to use Novodex, but it's for 3D. That always mean you have to use "tricks" to make it 2D like bounding everything to a z=0 plane.
There should be some 2D physics engine that's capable of some rigid bodies, ropes, collision detection, friction, etc. Right?
If you know of one, please tell me :)
Edit: still interested even though I got ODE to compile ;)
[Edited by - Seriema on December 28, 2004 6:57:18 PM]

Its not exactly an engine, but whenever I need physics code I just take it from http://www.magic-software.com/SourceCode.html. Also, if you own the book Game Physics by David Eberly, you can download the entire Wild Magic Engine with Physics support for free.

It may not be exactly what you want, but as far as code for 2D Physics, this is the best I have found. There is source code for 2D and 3D geometry. If anyone else knows of an actual engine I would be interested in this too.

And when reading that license, the first thing is:"(a) You must own a copy of The Book (“Own The Book”) to use The Software. Ownership of onebook by two or more people does not satisfy the intent of this constraint."

Since I don't have the book it would be wrong to use the code, even thought it's right there and I can almost smell it! :P

I'm writing a 2D only physics engine. My belief is that while the 3d physics engines are just starting to get into good user/environment interaction, there is already plenty of horsepower in the newer computers to do realtime liquid, mass objects physics if it is limited to 2D.

there are some 2d physics demos + source code, it could be worth to look at it.

Quote:

If anyone else knows of an actual engine I would be interested in this too.

I second that - if anyone could share some good links to 2d physics engines (though I think such ones don't exist) or even completed 2d game's engines, that use 2d physics, I would also be greatly interested in it - from experience I know that writing 2d algorithms based on 3d versions isn't just dropping out z axis :-)

you can try my 2d engine, kyc-bats.sf.net (~30meg .rar chronodoll download, and click on the screenshots link for an idea of how it looks).

I plan on rewriting it sometime after finishing my current game, but that may be a few months from now.

If you decide to take a look, make sure you check out all of the different builds. Also some of the binaries are not representative of the sources, so rebuild if you can. You can also change the map files and change the springiness and masses, etc... A noteworthy build is chronobeast (it's just cool heh).

There should be some 2D physics engine that's capable of some rigid bodies, ropes, collision detection, friction, etc. Right?

This is a really important discussion. For us not capable for different reasons an easy-to-use 2D physics library with these features is just what we need. I got several amazing ideas I could make with a library like this is my hands.

The closest thing I found was this but it is discontinued due to the developer running out of time, but it looks really promising. The complex demo is just awesome and shows some of what you can do with the power of 2d physics:

There a few pretty good 2d physics engines written in flash, so you could port the open source ones over to whatever programming language you use and even use them as a starting point for your own engine.

Flade (Flash Dynamics Engine) - http://cove.org/flade/This engine is not in development anymore (see next section), but it's still very good, especially since it's open source.

APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) - http://www.cove.org/ape/The continuation to Flade, APE is still in the early alpha stage, so it doesn't have as many features as Flade, but it shows very much promise for the future. It's also open source, so you can tinker around with it :P

I think I've ranted about just using plain ODE for 2D physics before, but I'll happily do it again :)

To my experience, plain ODE works perfectly for 2D. Just keep all your Z-values zero, and everything just stays perfectly in the XY plane. Furthermore, only do rotations and torques around <0,0,1>. Voila. A very good 2D physics engine, no need for any modifications/extensions to ODE.

This is the approach used by xmoto. The primary downside to this is the heavier computational requirements: a strict 2D physics approach would lower these quite a lot.